Parallel Lives (Greek)

What It Is

Plutarch was a Greek from Boeotia, a priest at Delphi, and a Roman citizen, writing around AD 100 about men who had mostly been dead for four or five hundred years. He composed forty-eight biographies in pairs, a Greek beside a Roman, each pair rounded off with a formal comparison. Oxford's Greek Lives gathers nine of the Greek halves: Lycurgus, Solon, Themistocles, Cimon, Pericles, Nicias, Alcibiades, Agesilaus and Alexander.

Early in the Life of Alexander he stops to explain his method. He is writing lives, he says, not histories, and a phrase or a piece of mockery can reveal a man's character more than a siege with ten thousand dead. That sentence is one of the most consequential in European literature. It is where biography stops being a branch of history and becomes an art with its own subject.

Each life runs thirty to sixty pages and stands alone. This is a book you can open anywhere.

Why It Matters

An enormous amount of what a Western reader thinks they know about the Greeks comes from here rather than from the Greeks themselves. The whole Western image of Sparta, austere, disciplined and terrifying, is essentially Plutarch's. So is the picture of Athens at its height.

He also invented a way of thinking about character that we have never given up: the assumption that a person's public conduct expresses a private moral shape, and that studying great men closely will improve you. Montaigne kept him constantly at hand and quotes him hundreds of times. Rousseau said Plutarch made him a republican. Emerson thought no library was complete without him. Two thousand years of biography, and every profile in every magazine, run downstream of this method.

The judgment worth making plainly: he is a superb witness to character and a poor one to fact. He is centuries from his subjects and uses lost sources uncritically. Read him for the portraiture and for the anecdotes nobody else troubled to preserve, and read Herodotus and Thucydides for what happened.

Before You Read

Fifteen hours or so, and no obligation to be systematic. One life at a sitting is the natural unit, and the collection can be taken in any order.

If you want a way in, start with Alcibiades, who is the most modern figure in the book and the most enjoyable to watch, then read Pericles for the contrast. Lycurgus is best read last, when you can see how much of it Plutarch is likely to have inherited rather than known.

A little Thucydides beforehand helps for the Athenian lives, but is not required. Plutarch explains as he goes; he was writing for readers who needed telling too.

Which Translation to Read

• Robin Waterfield (Oxford World's Classics) — recommended. Brisk, natural modern English that reads like prose rather than translation, with introduction and notes by Philip Stadter, the leading Plutarch scholar of his generation. It is the most intelligently annotated selection available and it never feels like homework. The cost: it is a selection, and it prints the Greek lives without their Roman partners, so the comparisons Plutarch wrote them for are gone. You will end up buying the companion volumes, which is presumably the idea. View on Amazon →
• Ian Scott-Kilvert, The Rise and Fall of Athens (Penguin Classics), revised with John Marincola. Nine Greek lives in an overlapping but not identical selection, cheaply and readably done. The cost: the translation dates from 1960 and shows it, and Penguin's habit of carving the Lives into period volumes makes the set confusing to assemble.
• Dryden, revised by A. H. Clough (Modern Library, two volumes). The complete Lives in the English that Emerson, the American founders and most of the nineteenth century actually read. Magnificent as prose and priced like a paperback. The cost: it is a seventeenth-century translation lightly patched in the nineteenth. It is not accurate by modern standards and it does not pretend to be.

Take Waterfield to read Plutarch, Scott-Kilvert if you already own the Penguins, Dryden and Clough if you want everything and can live with the age of it. Bernadotte Perrin's Loeb gives you all forty-eight lives with the Greek facing.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read the notes. Plutarch drops names of politicians, festivals and lawsuits as though you were at the next table, and Stadter's notes are the difference between amusement and bafflement.

Watch what he chooses. A life will pass over a decade of campaigning in a paragraph and then spend two pages on what a man said when someone insulted his mother. That choice is the book working, and it is where Plutarch's real argument lives.

Resist the urge to read him for information. He is not an encyclopedia of ancient Greece, though he is often used as one. He is a moralist with a gift for the small revealing thing, and the pleasure is in watching him decide what matters.